India Next Generation - A Burning Desire

These days, it seems like I too much carried away with few terms like potential, goals, thinking, creativity, maturity and freedom. Though I have picked up these words from the books of OSHO and from many self development books. One thing that excite me is converting potential to action. The potential is necessary to build oneself but not sufficient. One needs to nurture oneself to convert the potential to kinetic and to mobilize things. In the blog I wrote yesterday, I talked about our role and being socially responsible. I had an opportunity to change the thought process of few students positively. Though, my contribution was so little and can be quantified to negligible. It gave me immense satisfaction because of the fact that I was able to initiate some thought process. (or at least I think that I can initiate). I didn't know anything of my potential unless I see something which can actually take place only if I do some action. Having the potential and not using is sin which is equivalent to not having at all.

Now, I would like to look from another perspective about the gift of giving. It is the natural law and Mother Nature ensures that the person who gives get more happiness than the getter. I am not sure how the getters are going to feel after a period of time. However, the giving elevates one's confidence apart giving him an enriching experience. This particularly idea can be proved correct and one can validate it. For example, I was little known to motivate people just by my talks however by sharing my thoughts I was able to understand my very nature. I should thank Mother Nature for holding this law.

I also feel that if one engages oneself in giving particularly knowledge, the idea can be transmuted to reality and due course the idea spreads like virus. Yep, any idea is contagious and that is "The Tipping Point". Once it crosses the threshold, there will be so many people catching up the idea and buy in to the idea. Each one of them who connect to it emotionally will end up transmuting the idea to reality. This transmutation and the concept of "The Tipping Point" is sufficient to build a great India. Or to put it simply in the words of Dr Kalam, to become a biggest super power.

But all these takes little step on a daily basis. As Robin Sharma says, "Your hours are the miniature of your life". I have prepared to join with rest of the people who are dreaming to make India, the biggest and I want to see human evolution at its top before I die. I want to honestly engage for this cause to make India Next Generation simply because it gives be a great satisfaction and learning. It is a Win-Win composition for both the givers and takers (tilted towards the giver).

Started to Live :-)

It was a great experience and most fulfilling for me. I was invited to speak at Pavai Engineering College at Salem, Tamilnadu. It was an inaugural fuction of a department's association. I prepared few topics that are bit technical (Linux and Open Source). I wanted to revolve around the concept of Open Source Software and how the students can build their career using Open Source Software. There were quite a few thoughts came to my mind. Another topic was in Linux - Basics. So, I was all set for the function thinking that I would speak to the students on these areas.

Two days before the function, I was told that I needed to give an inaugural speech. Though I didn't feel that I was competent to be a chief guest, I didn't want to turn down as it might spoil the entire game. I was sitting with other dignitaries. Except me, all were highly accomplished in their careers and served for the society which was equivalent to my age. I was moved by their presence and their very presence motivated me. I felt that it was my responsibility to pay back the students with due respect and so I decided to devote my entire day with them.

After few speeches (Welcome address, oath and address be Chairman of the college), I was invited to speak. When I was about to start, I could see the entire conference hall was full of students and I could see sparkles in everyone's eyes. The students were hoping to get something from me, since I was from IT industry and they thought I knew more (which is not true). I didn't want to give a monotonous talk but thought I could touchbase with the students. I wanted to hear from them what they wanted from me. For the next 2-4 minutes, the room was in a pin drop silent and with little bit of motivation few voiced their thoughts. Being from rural background many of the students were so closed and even if they were willing to open, they were mouth-tied. On a contrary, I was talking like a guy with oral diarrhoea.

All the dignitaries were helping students to open up and I triggered a question "What do you think you can't do?" There came an intelligent reply from a boy, "I can do anything". My question was "Can you give birth a baby?". The answer was obvious. Slowly and gradually nearly 10 percent of the gathering open their voice and told they can do this, they can do that. Then we discussed about IT industry, the future (why they get job?) and what it takes to come to IT. The first leg of the function got over with a small mind game.

The second half started with a workshop and various technical topics so that they could pursue their areas of interest along with their classmates. We formed 8-10 groups containing 8-10 students in each group. The students talked about various technologies. I really liked and learned a lot from this activity and this activity ran for 2 hours and then we parted for lunch. The post lunch session was on Linux Architecture and actually the prepared one. I covered 4 slides in 90 minutes and stopped the presentation as many students were very new to operating systems.

During my inbound journey back to Chennai, I thought about the differences in India even among the students who are doing PG courses in Software Engineering and Information Technology. The exposure that the village students have is very little. We, the so-called Tech Leads, Architects and everyone working in IT, have the social responsibility. I am not here to preach and ask you do. I feel, serving for the country is very personal thing and no one asked M.K Gandhi to become Mahatma and no one asked Dr Kalam to become lifelong teacher. I wish to follow their footsteps. May God bless India Next Generation.

Overall, after the event, I felt that I started to live and there is a meaning for my existence.

Overview on VMWare Workstation and Player

In one of my previous blogs, I wrote on Virtualization and its role in productivity and resource optimization. It also plays crucial part in having power savings by reducing the number of servers. Virtualization, as a solution, is considered very seriously by many organizations. In this blog, the review of one such Virtualization product, VMware Workstation is presented. Before starting, let me clarify. Neither I am an investor nor a paid reviewer. I try to present my personal views based on more than four years of experience with VMware workstation and one year experience with VMWare player.

Running Multiple VMs
VMWare workstation had a modest start and three years back, you cannot have more than one virtual machine running on your system. Meaning that you can create as many virtual machine as you need but you can have only one VM live and running. Over a period of time, this restriction was overcome and now one can run any number of virtual machines. When you start a virtual machine, you need to understand that you are running an operating system inside an application which runs on a physical operating system (or hardware). In order to explain clearly, each virtual machines (called as Guest OS), runs inside VMWare which is an application that runs on Linux/Windows (physical system). Often people forget this and expect that their virtual machines to be rocket fast. Really speaking, for every virtual machine you need to have at least 1GB RAM to run smoothly. Here the key is running so many virtual machines in parallel.

Modes of Networking
The next feature is that one can have so many network configurations like NATed environment, Host only networking, No networking and bridged networking. VMWare comes with virtualized DHCP server which takes care of IP address allocation to your virtual machines. The user has liberty to modify the IP addresses provided by VMWare through reasonably good user interface. Apart from this network configuration, one can form virtual team. The virtual team is the network of virtual machines. The virtual team is similar to that of real network and interestingly VMWare provides ways to configure network packets loss percentage.

Virtual Devices
Since all the devices are virtualized, one can add hardware to the virtual machine. VMWare workstation allows you to create 25 ethernet cards. One can increase the size of virtual hard disk or add new hard disk.


Snapshot Manager
VMWare also has Snapshot manager. A snapshot is nothing but a frozen state. At any instant of time, the user can freeze the state of virtual machine and the snapshot can be restored. VMWare comes with a nice and interactive Snapshot manager which makes archiving the states easier for you. This is the one of the cool feature that I like in VMWare. If you do not have time to analyze an issue, you can archive it and revisit later. The other features like record and playback and suspend are notable features.

Using VMWare workstation one can create virtual machines and run them. Typically, we will not be creating VM all times. We will create VMs once in while and put them in production by running the VMs. So, in order to run a VM, VMWare player is enough. In VMWare player, it just runs only one Virtual machine. You do not have the luxury of running a team or many VMs. By the way, Workstation is commercial product but Player is a free software.

Hope this write up will help you to understand VMWare better. More information can be found here.

Design Pattern Tutorial (Design Pattern 101)

Learn from the mistakes of others is one of the famous quotes. Each one of us try to apply this in our life and we will be happy if we do it. The same thing, rather there is little different in Design Patterns. Design Patterns are solution to the common design problems. Software community after facing a lot of challenges and solving a problem in so many ways, has finally arrived to a optimal way. And this is called as Design Pattern. It is not at piece of code but concept which can be applied in variety of scenarios irrespective of the language and domain. Having said that, does it really help software community. Yes, really it is.

So, make up your mind to read further.

It has helped so many other developers and hence it should also help you. And one more interesting fact is that a lot of developers use design patterns without being aware that they are using one. For example, if you have used wait(), notify(), notifyAll() is an observer pattern. So you have been using it without knowing. Then why should you learn it. Because all the design patterns are solution to specific problem and focused towards object oriented concepts, reusability, maintainability. And also, it is not just one, there are 23 core design patterns and each one of them have an intent and the specific way of application. It is a reusable concept/solution.

Apart from the solution, the design pattern let the developers to speak a common and a quick language. For example, if you ask someone "how to go to a place where lot of people are standing on a platform to go to a distant place. The people will be carried by a series of wagons that are connected and pulled by an electric or diesel engine. Also, the entire vehicle goes on two tracks that are separated by 1.5 metres". What would be the answer? Aren't you elaborating and complicating too much. Instead of asking the way to railway station, you simply beat around the bush and simply irritating the stranger. The very same (shame) thing happens if you do not know design patterns. Design patterns improves your productivity by making you solve problems in a right way and also to have your discussion short and to the point.

These are some of the reasons why one should know design patterns. After all, it is you, who is going to benefit by learning it. You ll end up giving a better and nicer software to your customer.

Watch out for a series of blogs on patterns.

Upcoming Write-up: Types of Design Patterns.

Virtualization - A new wave

It was three years back, it was an accident that I was hooked up with Virtualization without knowing that one day it would become a hot area. Today (at least from end of 2006), there has been so much advancements in Virtualization. It clearly remember that VMWare workstation was my first virtualization software and Linux was my first virtual machine.

During end of 2004, I wanted to learn Linux and experiment with it but did not have a desktop where I can install a farm of variety of Linux distributions. Once I thought, installing many distributions would make me Linux geek. Soon I realized that it wouldn't and got rid of so many distributions but I retained VMWare workstation simply because it was (is) a cool tool. My first assignment with Linux was to learn POSIX threads and compare the threading behavior with Solaris. As I was doing the first assignment, since I am a monkey, I wanted to jump to writing system calls. Taking a snapshot in my virtual machine (which will save the current state), I moved to a fresh state and started the experimentation of Linux system call. (Actually I completed both the work and published two articles in Linux for You - Confession to say that I m trying not be a monkey).

Two years later, I got a chance to install the new version of VMware workstation and to my surprise it had hell a lot of features like running multiple VMs, networking them, wide range of virtual hardware configuration, record and play back. After exploring the entire VMWare workstation, I realized that it is killer tool which could actually be used for maximizing resource utilization and also to improve productivity. If you are impressed and want to read more, I would recommend you to read some white papers on Virtualizaton from VMWare

These days, many of the organizations are trying to use virtual machine to reduce the cost of hardware and more importantly I feel Virtualization has key role to play in making this world green. Since you virtualize so may PCs, you end to using lesser power and your system dissipate less heat which is good for our planet. If you are a software developer or a decision maker and an environmentalist, you got to seriously consider in using virtualization.

Apart from commercial virtualization software, you can also find few open source or free virtualization software. Shortly, I will be writing on more blog on virtualization products. both commercial and open source.